Archives for November 2017

For the past three years, I’ve posted a list of five things that every PM should be thankful for (you can see the other installments here: 2014, 2015, 2016). It started as a bit of a lark, something to fit in with the holiday, but each year’s list has been more popular than the last, so it’s become something of an annual tradition here at the Clever PM. Just as in prior years, consider this an unranked list of five things to be thankful for — not an exclusive list, certainly, but without these things our jobs would be incredibly more difficult than they already are. If you have other things you’re thankful for, feel free to note them in the comments!

The concept of MVP is an interesting one in the Product Management world — interesting, in that just like the role itself, it seems to mean something different to almost everyone that you talk to. On one side of the spectrum, you’ve got the Lean Product folks who seem to think that a landing page without any other context is an MVP; on the other you’ve got people who seem to think that you’ve got to have a full end-to-end solution that’s just ugly to achieve an MVP. The truth, however, lies somewhere in between the two — as I’ve noted before, there are some key considerations that come into play when coming up with our MVP (When is an MVP *not* an MVP?, but there’s more to it than just understanding the “Minimal”, the “Viable”, and the “Product”. Ultimately, MVPs must all serve some purpose; otherwise there’s really no point in it.

During this year’s ProductCamp Seattle, I sat in on a great presentation by Dave Manningsmith where he discussed several dysfunctions of the daily standup ceremony (or “ritual” as he referred to it) that so many of us participate in on a daily basis. And it really made me think a lot about just how badly so many of us actually do in our standups — whether it’s because we’re used to status reporting in authoritarian cultures, because we’re really just teams in name only but still executing as individuals, or (most likely) because the organization has never really taken the time to understand why we do standups, so they don’t even understand that they might be doing them wrong. Here are some common anti-patterns and resolutions that will help you ensure that you’re at least closer to doing a standup “right” in the future…